Okay, I went back and forth on several mummy TV shows to feature today, but I think I found a good one. And by “good one”, I mean it’s terrible. Let’s check out I Love Mummy, a UK-Canadian production from 2002.

A family inherits an old house which inexplicable contains the sarcophagus of a 3000 year old Egyptian prince in the attic.

The young son unwittingly opens the sarcophagus and out pops the wrapped up prince. And a chase around the kitchen table ensues.

After lots of screaming and the aforementioned chase around the kitchen table, we find out the prince is sort of a spoiled royal brat. We even flashback to ancient Egypt to see proof of his bratty behavior.

After he died while surfing down the exterior of the Sphinx, he became stuck in purgatory. He’ll have to stay stuck in purgatory until he completes a list (on a scroll, of course) of things he has to learn on his own. I wonder if this is where the idea for My Name is Earl came from.

Obviously the family is reluctant to take this responsibility on, but the young son has become “attached”. So he doofuses his way into making the family “keep” the undead pharaoh. Because, let’s not forget, he is undead.

The show is, in a word, awful. I didn’t expect any better, to be honest. But there are two things that make this show interesting. First, the daughter, Stephy, played by Kelly Turner, is crazy hot.

Second, the mummy, Nuff, is played by Elyes Gabel. You may not recognize that name, but he’s currently the star of that CBS show, Scorpion.

And after seeing both shows, I don’t think there’s that much a difference in quality between the two.

Today I’m going to talk about a specific mummy character from one of my favorite comic series, The Sixth Gun, by Cullen Bunn and Brian Hurtt.

The comic is a horror western about six cursed pistols and the battle between good and evil to possess the guns and prevent them from destroying and remaking the world. There’s so much stuff running through this comic like gunfighters, undead Civil War generals, dark swamp gods, skinwalkers, black magic, ghosts and a 9 foot tall mummy. It really is worth a read and I can’t recommend it enough. The series as a whole ended this year with issue #50 and I recently did a re-read of the entire series from Book 1 up to the final issue and I loved every bit of it. The comic really gets deep into its own mythology and I really liked how it ended.

Anyway, the part of this comic I want to discuss today is the aforementioned 9 foot tall mummy. His name is Asher Cobb.

Asher first shows up in the series in the collected edition Book 3: Bound. Specifically in the final page of issue #12.

He shows up out of nowhere and steals the coffin containing the undead corpse of the evil General Hume. He fights spectacularly for the next issue and a half. Then, in issue #14, we finally get his origin as told to us by an old carnie.

Asher Cobb was born deformed. He was oversized, which made him an outcast. To add to that, he also received visions. Visions of the future. He was befriended only by a nice girl named Ruth who he fell in love with. One day he received a terrible vision of Ruth’s death. So to prevent the death of the girl he loved, he sought out some old witches and made a devil’s bargain to cheat death. But to do that, he had to endure death.

Unfortunately Asher was not able to prevent Ruth’s death so he is constantly wandering, driven crazy by his unnaturally long life and the knowledge that he couldn’t prevent Ruth’s death. He is at first used by the forces of evil as a tool, but Asher would show up much later helping out the good guys and hoping that whomever acquired the guns and remade the world, would also bring back his beloved Ruth.

Asher is a pretty great character, both in the story but also visually. He is super strong, gets visions of the future and just looks awesome. He’s just one of the reasons I love this comic.

This year, despite my theme being mummies, I decided not to watch or review the most recent Universal The Mummy movies starring Brendan Fraser as Rick O’Connell. I liked those movies okay, but I had other lesser known movies I wanted to watch and talk about first. However, as a compromise, I decided to mention the animated series that is based on those movies.

In 2001, the WB aired The Mummy: The Animated Series. It was loosely based on the first two Stephen Sommers The Mummy movies.

The main characters are, of course, Evie and Rick O’Connell, their son Alex, Evie’s brother Johnathan and the evil mummy Imhotep. Rick O’Connell, surprisingly, is not voiced by Brendan Fraser (what, was he busy?). He’s voiced by none other than Bo Duke himself, John Schneider. There’s another character in here called The Minotaur that is voiced by Kevin Michael Richardson who voiced The Joker in the 2004 animated The Batman series as well as a slew of other roles in super hero cartoons like Avengers Assemble, Hulk and the Agents of SMASH, Ultimate Spider-Man, Young Justice, etc.

The plot somewhat retcons the movies a little. Back in ancient Egypt, Imhotep is in possession of the Scrolls of Thebes and is searching for the Manacle of Osiris. Just as he’s about to steal it, he’s caught and sentenced to be mummified alive (again, why ALIVE?!). Flash forward to present day, Imhotep is revived by Colin Weasler and he begins the hunt for the Manacle anew. Like in The Mummy Returns, Alex gets the Manacle on his own arm which causes Imhotep to hunt him to obtain it. Rick and Evie battle Imhotep to keep the Manacle away from him with the help of the Medjai, sacred protectors of ancient Egypt.

There’s a lot of Medjai back story in the cartoon as well as plenty of searches for things with “of” in the title (Manacle of Osiris, Scythe of Anubis, Lake of Eternity, etc, etc). It’s a not bad, if not great, animated cartoon adventure series. About as good as those last two Fraser Mummy movies.

Anne Rice is known for her vampire books, but she’s written a slew of other supernatural books featuring other things like witches, werewolves and, more relevant to today’s article, a mummy.

Per Anne Rice’s bibliography, I was aware of the Vampire Chronicles as well as a few of her other erotic tales that she’d written. I had read Interview with the Vampire and tried to read The Vampire Lestat back in college but gave up after twenty pages or so. I hadn’t been aware of this mummy book until I started researching for AWESOME-tober-fest.

The premise is thusly; an archaeologist discovers a long lost tomb, presumably to Ramses the Great. He opens it up and begins cataloging everything and notices several weird details like lots of Roman and Greek influences as well as Latin inscribed on the tomb itself. However, before he can finish translating the tomb’s scrolls, the archaeologist is killed, seemingly by a curse on the tomb. And when the mummy and artifacts are brought to London to be displayed in the archaeologist’s home, strange things begin happening, not the least of which is that the mummy itself has risen from its sarcophagus.

That’s a quick, elevator pitch to what’s going on. I’ll say this, I liked the plot of the book. It was interesting. The titular character was interesting as well. In fact, Ramses himself seemed like a variation of Rice’s vampires. He’s immortal, he has a “thirst”, not for blood, but for satiating his physical senses with things like eating, smoking, drinking and sex. However, instead of existing only at night, Ramses is fueled by the sun. He’s like a “sun vampire”, if you will.

Anyway, like I said, I enjoyed the book’s overall plot but the page to page events were too exposition-y with a bit too much of the Harlequin melodrama. I don’t need to be hammered over the head with how evil cousin Henry is. Or how “in on it” Uncle Randolph is. I don’t need to hear how much the daughter is falling for the bad boy Ramses despite her feeble attempts to ignore her yearnings. You got a good plot, let it run, Anne, don’t bog it down. There are too many characters with too many less interesting stakes in what goes on and it bogs down what could be a nicely paced action yarn.

The action does pick up a bit in the last third, but honestly, by then, I was prepared to tap out. I didn’t really care for any of these characters and I was only mildly interested in the conclusion to the story.

Okay, I’m doing a more popular monster, so I get to visit a Hammer film this year! In 1959, one of the more prolific Hammer directors, Terence Fisher, as well as one of the more prominent writers, Jimmy Sangster, tackled Hammer’s version of The Mummy.

It starred the usual Hammer all stars, Peter Cushing as John Banning and Christopher Lee as the mummy. As in the other Hammer monster movies, their mummy movie was based on Universal’s version, but maybe not the one you’d think. Instead of re-adapting Universal’s 1932 The Mummy, starring Boris Karloff, this movie takes it’s story from two of the later Universal mummy sequels; The Mummy’s Hand (1940) and The Mummy’s Tomb (1942). With a little bit of the climax from The Mummy’s Ghost (1944). And while the Karloff version is held in higher regard, I feel the sequels have a bit more fun with the subject.

I won’t say this particular movie was a misstep. But it wasn’t a favorite. It just seemed to drag a lot, especially in the middle. But while the story was lacking, the other Hammer touches where there. The set design is GREAT.

The tombs look great and are set designed in that spectacular way that Hammer usually does. I mean check out the above picture of the recently opened tomb. It’s not been opened in thousands of years but the green lights apparently still work. Amazing.

Also, Cushing and Lee are great as always. I just love watching Cushing be gentlemanly and awesome.

And Lee’s mummy looks just incredible as well. Especially when he’s getting shotgunned in the chest by Peter Cushing.

And check out this “ancient scroll” that is the basis for much of the plot of this movie.

Looks like it was printed last Thursday at Kinkos. That being said, it’s beautiful looking. Take a look at the inscriptions on the left picture (click it). That’s some wonderfully detailed imagery for just a few seconds of on screen footage. That’s Hammer for you.

Here’s where I think the problem lies. The mummy, as a monster, is essentially boring. He’s too passive. Much like my issues with traditional zombies, I don’t really enjoy watching mummy movies. And that’s my main problem with this movie. The mummy is used as “muscle”, the second banana if you will. It’s probably why I like the Brendan Fraser mummy movies a bit more because I feel like that mummy was in charge. He actually felt dangerous. While it was fun to watch Cushing and Lee, the overall story was a bit boring, but that’s a problem with most mummy movies for me and not necessarily a problem with Hammer’s movie.

There were five stories written by a Massachusetts writer named Hazel Heald which were revised by HP Lovecraft and published. I’ll talk about one of those stories today.

The story is called Out of the Aeons and it was published in the April 1935 issue of Weird Tales magazine.

Like the Doyle story The Ring of Thoth, this story isn’t a typical “mummy story”. It begins with the discovery of a mysterious mummy on a mysterious island that mysteriously appeared in the middle of the ocean and then mysteriously disappeared soon after its discovery.

The story is written as a letter of final confession for the curator of the Cabot Museum in Boston. The letter explains that some unbelievable and terrifying events have sprung up around the mummy and this letter he’s writing is to set down on record what actually happened as museum officials have essentially “white washed” the majority of the story with the press.

Much of the story is the curator delving into the history of the mummy. It’s a fairly interesting and creepy sort of legend that has been culled from several banned tomes like “The Black Book” and the “Necronomicon”. About half the story is catching the reader up to what the mummy could possibly be. The back half of the story is essentially what happens to the mummy in the museum when the story gets out and the exhibit becomes popular. All the nutzos come out and the situation escalates to a creepy and horrific end.

I enjoyed this short story. I think I liked it even better than the previous Lovecraft stories I read, Herbert West, Re-animator and From Beyond. I really need to delve into some of the Cthulhu stories. Lovecraft’s writings have sort of the “creeping dread” atmosphere that keeps you on the edge of your seat feeling like something just isn’t “right”. Very effective.

A few tidbits of Lovecraftian mythos make appearances in this story. One of the characters who briefly visits the mummy is awesomely named Swami Chandraputra, which is a known alias for Randolph Carter, one of Lovecraft’s recurring characters. There are several Dark Gods listed in this story, two of them being previously mentioned as a part of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos. Lastly, the previous curator of the museum who actually discovers the mummy is named Pickman and shares this name with the painter in Lovecraft’s story Pickman’s Model.

The premise is very mummy-y. Evil sorcerer Scarab kills the Pharaoh’s son but is entombed alive for his crime (why do they never KILL these guys? It’s always entombed ALIVE). He revives in modern day (1997) and searches for the reincarnation of the prince he killed. However, the prince’s protectors are also revived to protect him from harm. It’s a constant battle to keep Scarab from getting his hands on the reincarnated prince.

The prince’s guardians are all mummies each with the power of an Egyptian god. Ja-Kal uses the spirit of falcon, Rath uses the spirit of snake, Armon uses the spirit of ram, and Nefer-Tina uses the spirit of cat. They are able to call upon these powers for magical armor and abilities.

And in typical “cartoon magical transformations” form they call on the powers when they are in immediate danger but then it takes 30 seconds or more for all four mummies to fully transform and by then, in reality, they’d all be dead.

To trigger their powers, the mummies call out the phrase “With the Strength of Ra!” Using these magical abilities depletes their strength, so once their strength is exhausted, they must rest in their sarcophagi to regain their abilities.

Along with Scarab, the mummies had to contend with a litany of Egyptian gods and monsters like Anubis, Set and Sekhmet. But the best episode has to be the one where the mummies actually take a tour of Alcatraz (not even kidding). Here’s the cartoon version of Alcatraz Island.

The show only ran one season but managed to pump out 42 episodes.

You can check out the very first episode, Ra! Ra! Ra! below:

Here’s the episode called The Bird-Mummy of Alcatraz where the mummies take the tour of the infamous prison: